The Mystery in Writing by Darlene Beck Jacobson

 I don't know about you, but I love a good mystery story. Following along as a detective or police officer shares clues and narrows down suspects to find the guilty party and solve the crime. I've been hooked ever since I read my first books by Carolyn Keene in elementary school, and then Agatha Christie and Early Stanley Gardner when I was in my teens

  

While there is a definitive genre for mysteries, I am making a case for the MYSTERY of writing in EVERY genre. The discovery of character and how that character grows, changes, and interacts with the rest of the players. Until I begin writing, many aspects of the character's development is a mystery.

How the plot unfolds with each scene and where it takes the character is a mystery. I am often surprised at the places I end up going and the things my character ends up doing to move the story along. So much of what happens seems to evolve as I write. It changes as I write as well, and I am never sure where I'll end up. That's another mystery of writing.

 

 

 

So even though the middle grade stories I write are not technically labeled as mystery stories, mysterious things happen on every page as I put pen to paper. Perhaps the biggest, most amazing mystery of all is that all those words, and all those pages somehow turn into a story.

When Darlene Beck Jacobson isn't reading mysteries or writing mysterious things, she can be found watching classic mysteries on TV. She especially enjoys the British ones found on BBC and PBS.